The whole THQ bankruptcy thing has pretty much just been a sad and depressing debacle. It's great and all that a number of franchises and studios will live on, but there are still definitely a number of folks that will no longer have a job. Such is the way of things in the video game industry. Luckily, THQ was known for some particularly strange marketing efforts. One of the outgoing employees, Neal Pabon, just so happened to get his hands on a Saints Row-branded 40. Even better? Someone was there to video him as he poured one out for his homies.
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Atari Inc. and three of it affiliates in the U.S. are throwing in the towel. Filing for Chapter 11 reorganization in a New York State bankruptcy court, Atari Inc. aims to disentangle itself from its French parent company Atari S.A. -- originally Infogrames -- in a similar manner to how we scootch a few seats down the table to sit away from a creepy relative at family gatherings. If the American company successfully dissolves its ties to floundering France-based parent, Atari Inc.'s leaders intend to shift game development and publishing focus on digital and mobile platforms, though there are no specifics right now on what that might look like. Doesn't matter, really, since we all know they'll likely just churn out yet another modern update of Pong or Asteroids.

It's funny, we at Geekosystem have covered developments regarding THQ twice this month, the first being their Humble Bundle offering -- which reportedly raked in $5 million in a matter of two weeks -- and the Metro 2033 Facebook promotion where users could snag a free copy just for "liking" the page, but the whole time we did so, we couldn't help feel that these were ill portents of THQ's gradual decline in the marketplace. Turns out our intuition was right since the video game publisher has announced it will be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On the surface this seems like terrible news, but it actually isn't an utter loss for us gamers.

Bankruptcies, and the patents that companies sell off during them, tend to cause the strangest of bedfellows. Depending on what's at stake, otherwise competing groups will band together in order to gobble up whatever patents are for sale in order to avoid potential lawsuits going forward. Generally speaking, it's better for everyone involved. Litigation can get quickly get expensive, as Apple is well aware. So the news that Apple and Google might be teaming up to purchase Kodak's patents -- for sale thanks to their bankruptcy -- makes perfect sense. Even so, it's still odd to see the two working together.

An unsettling quality about bankruptcy auctions is that there's always an underlying crisis of conscience to the whole affair, since your gain came at the financial loss of another. Essentially, you can't walk away, new acquisition in hand, without feeling like the absolute scum of the Earth, but sometimes you just have to buck up and kick those qualms to the curb if you really want that worthwhile item, like, say, an original copy of the Metropolis movie poster. Next week, this poster and eight others will be up for auction, with rabid nerds willing to pay hand over fist for this piece of cinematic history.

Remember that little stunt back at Coachella 2012 when Snoop Dogg performed with a holographic Tupac Shakur? Well, that was only made possible thanks to Digital Domain Media Group, which has also been behind a number of special effects in films. They even won an Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Even so, none of these ventures panned out well enough as the company has now filed for bankruptcy. Looks like the business of holograms didn't exactly bring in the big money fast enough.

Gary Busey is broke, and apparently nearly half a million in the hole. In the face of enormous debt and a meager $19,000 a year income, Busey has declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy. This involved him not only itemizing all of his monetary assets, but also everything else that he owns. If it shocked you to learn that you probably make more than Busey does, you'll probably be twice as shocked to learn that you have more stuff than him.
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Wednesday night, Kodak said it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Depressing that such an iconic company has struggled enough to take the plunge and file chapter 11, it makes a bit of sense that a film company couldn't keep afloat during the age of digital photography, where almost everyone's phone takes pictures of satisfactory quality. Kodak hopes to escape bankruptcy sometime in 2013, and plans on restructuring using $950 million in financing from Citigroup.

According to The LA Times, Blockbuster and its biggest debtors have already discussed their plans to declare bankruptcy by mid-September with Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

Blockbuster has lost a total of $1.1 billion since the beginning of 2008 and has been severely hamstrung in efforts to grow its business due to interest payments on $920 million in debt. Earlier this month the company announced that most of its debt holders had agreed to a forbearance on interest payments until Sept. 30, during which time it would attempt a recapitalization.

Blockbuster's bankruptcy looks like it's going to be something of a tangled mess of retail vs. Hollywood vs. digital connections.
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